Yousuf Karsh (1908–2002) is widely recognized as one of the leading portrait photographers of the twentieth century. Arriving in Canada alone in 1924 as a fifteen-year-old displaced refugee of the Armenian genocide, Karsh mastered the art of portraiture through apprenticeships in stylish studios of the Pictorialist age. With his camera, he sought to capture the essential nature of his subjects in what he called the “elusive moment of truth.” Over the course of six decades, “Karsh of Ottawa” created a unique visual chronicle of celebrated legends and so-called ordinary sitters, becoming a celebrity in his own right.
In Yousuf Karsh: Life & Work, author Melissa Rombout introduces Karsh to new audiences by exploring his artistic choices in the wider context of twentieth-century portraiture practice. His vast body of work—encompassing more than 15,000 portrait sittings and now preserved at Library and Archives Canada—spans decades of changing photographic technologies. Karsh made iconic portraits of leading political, scientific, industry, and cultural figures such as Winston Churchill, Queen Elizabeth II, Martin Luther King, Jean Paul Riopelle, Andy Warhol, Margaret Atwood, Robert Oppenheimer, and Nelson Mandela, who themselves became iconic and known to millions through lavishly-illustrated books, popular magazines, fine art exhibitions, stamps, and currency.
“During his career spanning most of the twentieth century, ‘Karsh of Ottawa’ created a collective portrait of his era. Today, as we make and share images daily using our smartphones, it is a timely moment to consider Karsh’s mastery of modernist portraiture. By examining both celebrated and surprising key works from his œuvre, we can reflect on how photography shapes our understanding of power, fame, and self, and how our making and viewing of portraits shape us.”Melissa Rombout
This book offers a compelling examination of Karsh as an image-maker in every sense of the term. It addresses portraiture’s inherent ability to represent power and construct identity while also investigating the viewer’s role in making meaning. Taking an in-depth look at his acclaimed œuvre, Rombout considers how Karsh presented ideals of greatness, beauty, and order as timeless individual qualities in the face of collective alienation, fragmentation, and relentless change.
About the author
Melissa Rombout is an independent curator and lecturer on histories of photography. She received her PhD from Amsterdam’s School for Cultural Analysis considering the political performativity of art photography. Rombout has had a prolific career working with museums, libraries, and archives in Canada and internationally. In her former role as photohistorian at Library and Archives Canada, she specialized in research on the vast Yousuf Karsh archive and has since curated several Karsh exhibitions organized in Ottawa, London, and Canberra, including the major 2009 travelling exhibition Karsh: Image Maker, organized by the Portrait Gallery of Canada in collaboration with the Canada Science and Technology Museum.